Frank commentary from an unretired call girl

The Lion and the Ox

Concepts based in reality tend to be specific; the terms used to describe those concepts are for the most part unambiguous, and tests can be designed to determine if some object or phenomenon falls into the sphere delineated by the term. But politics is based in emotional manipulation, not reality; those who invent political agendas want them to be as vague and elastic as possible so that any person or thing opposed by those behind the agenda can easily be fit into the paradigm without having to redesign it and risk triggering skepticism in those who are to be led. “Human trafficking” is just such a framework, which is why it should be rejected by thinking people everywhere. It’s true that some people use it to mean one very tight, clear-cut concept, but they are a small minority among the millions who use it to mean nearly anything they want it to mean. Today we’re going to look at the various people and actions which are routinely crammed into the “human trafficking” circus tent; some people use the term to mean only some of these things, while others use it to mean others and some use it for any and all of them, and there’s never any way of knowing what any given speaker is thinking.

All of the following are referred to as “human trafficking” by one group or another:

1) Women crossing borders to work without proper documentation.
2) Transporting people across a border illegally.
3) Transporting undocumented immigrants within a country.
4) Providing forged papers or otherwise facilitating illegal migration.
5) Helping migrants to find someone who can transport them or otherwise facilitate migration.
6) Recruiting people to work in another country, whether honestly or dishonestly.
7) Lending money for migration, whether at a fair rate or a usurious one.
8) Hiring undocumented migrants, whether knowingly or unknowingly.
9) Helping undocumented migrants to find work.
10) Giving advice to undocumented migrants on any issue involving transportation, employment or avoiding “authorities”.
11) In countries with some legal form of prostitution, hiring any foreign sex worker.
12) Performing any illegal form of sex work.
13) Owning any kind of illegal or semi-legal sex business, even where no coercion exists.
14) Patronizing any kind of illegal sex business.
15) To prohibitionists, any kind of sex work at all, or running or patronizing any sexually-oriented business, even where such businesses are legal.
16) Under some legalization and criminalization regimes, providing work space, living quarters or transportation to prostitutes even if they are working legally.
17) Under the Swedish model, hiring a legal prostitute.
18) Interacting with an underage prostitute in any way other than reporting her to the police.
19) Abducting someone into an exploitative situation, except under color of law; if police or members of “anti-trafficking” NGOs lie, trick, intimidate, rob, beat, torture, chain, transport, cage and rape sex workers it is referred to as “rescue” rather than “trafficking”.
20) Marriage brokering.
21) Arranging surrogate motherhood contracts.
22) “Sex tourism”, even if the sex seller is not a full-time prostitute or receives gifts instead of cash.
23) Anything a prosecutor can shoehorn into the local law, including kidnapping or attempted rape.

I’m sure there are others, but that’s all I can think of at the moment. Similarly, “trafficked persons” can mean any of the following:

1) Voluntary migrants who cross borders to work illegally on their own or with the assistance of peers.
2) Voluntary migrants who cross borders to work illegally, with the assistance of smugglers or other facilitators; whether these contracts are fair or openly exploitative by Western standards (yet often no worse than those of some legal American businesses), and whether their recruitment methods are honest or dishonest, are immaterial to the “trafficking” paradigm.
3) Voluntary migrants who cross borders to work legally, but then become “illegal” through some kind of change in condition and continue to work illegally, with or without the help of facilitators.
4) Voluntary adult sex workers, either domestic or foreign, with or without management of any kind.
5) Women who come into a country on valid visas and then do sex work on the side or leave the exploitative and woefully-underpaid (but legal) work they came in to do for the higher wages and vastly better conditions of sex work.
6) Female gang members of any age who do any kind of sex work.
7) Underage sex workers of any kind, with or without management, coercion or even transport.
8) People who are tricked or abducted into some kinds of exploitative labor.
9) Surrogate mothers.
10) Women who enter arranged or “mail-order” marriages.
11) People who have sex with tourists in exchange for cash, gifts or expensive entertainment.

And all of the following are referred to as “human traffickers”:

1) People who provide transportation or other facilitation to voluntary illegal migrants, whether their arrangements are fair or exploitative, mutually beneficial or coercive.
2) People who trick or abduct others into exploitative work without government permission to do so.
3) Migrants who help or give advice to other migrants.
4) People who hire undocumented immigrants.
5) Husbands or other adult male companions of female migrants.
6) Brothel or escort service owners under criminalization regimes or legalization regimes which prohibit such businesses; to prohibitionists, all brothel or service owners.
7) Pimps, including non-exploitative ones.
8) Anyone without a badge who transports any illegal sex worker from one place to another.
9) Under criminalization or the Swedish model, any client of a prostitute.
10) Under some legalization regimes, two or more prostitutes who work together for safety.
11) Couples who hire surrogate mothers.
12) Tourists who have sex with locals.

Yet, all of these things are supposed to be described by one paradigm, and that one is commonly referred to as “slavery” by many of its proponents; they also tend to claim that “trafficking” is controlled by vast criminal cartels despite a total lack of evidence for such a far-reaching conspiracy. This is like calling everything from a tricycle to the space shuttle a “ship”; the term is so vague, so flexible, so nonspecific that the listener cannot be sure what the speaker actually means when he uses it…which is exactly what those who promote the hysteria want.

32 Responses

oh,my im a trafficked person,i have sex with tourists every summer,in fact a very large percentage of Greeks are,according to that definition.the guys in the clubs always buy me drinks,to take me to the hotel room and when i had flings instead of one night stands they were taking me to clubs and restaurants,which in Greece and especially in the islands are always expensive.should i be afraid that police officers would break in the hotel room and arrest us?should i burn my diary and the ”best foreign lovers list”i have made,because it could spell trouble?is that the reason that there is such a high percentage of trafficking statistics in Greece,apart from illegal immigration?

haha,i havent put americans on the list,because ive had just one experience,which was good,though.i dont find americans visiting Greece as often as people from other european countries or Japan do and i wonder why.its normal that other europeans will visit more,since its closer but Japan-Greece is a 20 hour travel and the influx of them every year is astonishing.

Yep, it’s called “sex tourism” and it’s supposedly “exploitation” because you might not have had sex with the man had he not spent money on you. You know, just like most attractive women won’t…which I reckon makes dating “trafficking” as well.

This article sums up why I stopped believing in this mess. Sexual exploitation of little girls will get me fired up pretty quick – but then they group them with all this other crap and you realize – they don’t give a shit about those little girls because they water down the liturgy with this other crap that isn’t related. It’s a desperate attempt to control people and get money.

Fucking hilarious that some idiot put a “human trafficking” wikki up for every nation on the planet.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – – that’s all.”
(Through the Looking Glass, Chapter 6)

Please don’t be a smart-ass; we also call every physical entity in the universe by one name, “object”. But we don’t then follow it up by pretending the narrow definition for one single example applies to everything. For example, we don’t make laws about “vehicles” which assume that they are all three-wheeled, easily lifted by a normal adult, primarily intended for the use of small children and incapable of speeds above a few kph.

Thank for clearing that up. The problem with that line is that ship is itself a pretty vague term, so the idea you were going for didn’t really come through. The listener wouldn’t have made many assumptions about what the speaker was saying, unlike “slavery” or “Human Trafficking”

The problem is that “Slavery” is conflated with “prostitution”. While “slavery” *can* be part of prostitution, it can also be part of mining. Or domestic work. Or work of any kind.

The issue is that radical feminists have allied themselves with extreme sex-negative prudes and female-power opportunists (straight women who just want to have greater control over their own men, and usually use sex to do it). They did so in a de-facto alliance to strip prostitutes of rights (no matter what it’s called) for their own particular agendas.

The radical feminists think men and women should be kept apart. At best, men must serve women’s sexual interests; it’s never mutual, and all thing smale must be decried and denied. The others don’t necessarily think this, but the prudes want sexuality generally controlled (hence their demand for the end of pornography and saucy advertising and anything else to do with sex) and the middle-class opportunists are just along for the ride.

All of this gets manipulated by politicians, male and female, seeking to radically expand the powers of the state to criminalize more people, because the state’s overriding goal is always and without exception to exercise as much social control as people will tolerate. All states always do this all the time. There is no exception, ever, anywhere. This power always concentrates, unless people reject it. That rejection is almost always violent, because the state enforces its will violently.

So calling all of this “human trafficking” is nothing more than an attempt to trick people, Orwellian Futurespeak style, into discussing things only using the terms that best support one side of the argument.

Hence the brilliance of the Tent photo.

Can’t fight the idea of civil rights and freedoms? Then call civil rights and freedoms “expressions of oppressive power” because some choose to abuse this freedom, and eliminate freedoms or choice altogether.

Strange to think what can fall under this. Imagine if I were a wealthy man, visiting London for the Olympics, and I met a poor Londoner who loves dressage. We talk a bit, and when she finds out details she blurts out, “You’re going to the individual finals and your date changed her mind? Listen Yank, I will blow you if you take me to that. No, really.”

If I take her up on the offer, everybody wins: my ticket doesn’t go to waste, she gets to see individual dressage finals which she had zero chance of seeing before except on telly, I still get to see individual dressage finals, my former dressage date is still doing whatever she thought she’d rather do at that time, the London economy gets whatever money I spend on myself and on the poor Londoner beyond the already-bought tickets, and oh by the way I get a blow job.

But somehow, I’m an evil, heartless, despicable human trafficker and the cute dressage fan with the starry eyes, big smile, and talented tongue is an oppressed slave.

Actually, I’d rather see show jumping, but I’ve started to hit a theme with this dressage thing, so I thought I’d stick to that. And why is horseback archery not an Olympic event, huh?

Troll Hunting should be the next Olympic sport! A Norwegian friend of mine emailed me about this movie but she didn’t have to – because it’s one of the few Norwegian films to come across the pond to be released here in the states! So I heard about it that way too! 🙂

Speaking of the Olympics, despite the claimed increase in prostitution/trafficking around sporting events being well and truly debunked, feminist groups like the European Women’s Lobby have still been actively campaigning about it.

Even though prostitution isn’t actually illegal in the UK, they held a demonstration where they destroyed a copy of the Olympic Charter and called for prostitution around the Olympics to be “abolished” (i.e. prostitutes harassed by the police even more than they are already). Of course they still quote garbage trafficking statistics (like 40,000 prostitutes being trafficked into Germany and South Africa during the World Cup) as if they’re facts proving that there’s mass sex trafficking at London 2012.

They push plenty of other bogus statistics too, like the idea that an average prostitute has sex with 40 customers a day. It’s depressing that they’re the largest “women’s rights” organisation in Europe, with what they say accepted uncritically by many people in politics and the media.

What first made me sit up and take notice of the reality of “trafficking” was a news report (a few years back) of a British massage parlour madam being convicted and jailed for trafficking two women.

It turned out that there was no suggestion that the women had been subjected to any force or coercion, and they weren’t even travelling from a foreign country. The “victims” had willingly attended an interview at the massage parlour after seeing a job advert online. They were only classed as “trafficked women” because their prospective employer had reimbursed their travel expenses.

It turns out that a lot of the trafficking prosecutions in the UK are for “internal trafficking” where the only coercion is financial.

Not exactly the image anti-trafficking crusaders conjure up of imprisoned teenage Eastern European sex slaves, yet those successful convictions are used as proof that trafficking is a real problem in the UK; one requiring more draconian laws and increased funding for anti-trafficking groups.

A while ago you wrote a post, which unfortunately I cannot locate, asking your readers why we think people buy into the idea of human trafficking even though there is little evidence to support it. You listed a couple options and although I believe it is important to answer people’s questions when they ask them, at that time I didn’t feel I could identify any of your explanations as the exact right ones, but this post reminds me of the answer that I’ve since come up with.

I think people, or at least women, believe that human trafficking occurs because it fits with what they see first-hand. I think women sense, from the way men act toward them and around them, that it wouldn’t be so difficult for at least some of those men to take a sex slave. When they hear about people, some of whom are female, being “transported across a border illegally” or given “advice” by strangers in a strange country, it is easy for them to believe that men would exploit women in that situation, and, really, it is their instinct to assume that that is what would happen. Women know that men will barter sex for “advice” and help in everyday life, so it isn’t that far off to conclude that if a woman is in a country unfamiliar to her men will skip the bartering and just steal or coerce it.

It’s hard for me to say why men accept “human trafficking” as it is presented, because I am not a man, but I think it’s probably some combination of not knowing and not caring. Which may have been in your list of possible explanations.

I recognize that even with this explanation, your point still stands that there is not some international masterminded network of traffickers. The exploitation that exists is much more mundane than that and functions more like everyday life. As you’ve pointed out above, people have a range of ideas about what trafficking is; I don’t think my answer explains away the people who believe in specific images of evil criminal rings but rather the people who believe in a more vague version of it and kind of fit that to whatever the situation is, because they’ve seen something kind of like it in real life.

[…] statements about it at all. Looking at the various phenomena to which the label is applied – exploitative labor, arranged marriage, unorthodox immigration, usury, surrogate motherhood, sex work… – it’s difficult to understand how they’re connected other than the fact that most of them […]

[…] usually conceived of as “sex trafficking” despite the fact that the term is used to mean just about anything politicians and others who profit from the panic wish it to mean. I beg your indulgence of my love for quotations just once more today, in the form of […]

The self-fulfilling element of the trafficking propaganda has cut in; since it suits the authorities that the trafficking agenda fulfills itself (“Look! Trafficked whores!! we were right all along!!1!111!!!”) they have conflated enough non-trafficking situations to meet the originally claimed statistics, or at least inflate the actual *original* (true) trafficking (people smuggling for involuntary sex work) to be more like the hysterical predictions.

In other words, a circular argument. We’re sunk. They’ve made the evidence (“we have the real numbers! The Horror!!”) fit the theory.

Too many people have a vested interest in persecuting a minority group for this to go away of its own accord. It stinks.

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